Maybe it's a coincidence, but Dell's
recent round of layoffs seems to have sparked a flurry of price
mistakes on Dell.com. According
to the Wall Street Journal, Dell has plans to lay off 16
percent of its 4,500 strong workforce in Malaysia -- that means that
700 people will be out of a job by the end of June 2010.

Interestingly enough, around the same
time the layoffs were announced, numerous price mistakes started
hitting Dell's website. Deals site Slickdealswas the first to notice the steady stream of price mistakes with
one of the more popular finds being a 3.2GHz dual-core Xeon 5060
processor for a mere $10.99. Other popular pricing errors included a
Xeon E3110 (3GHz) for $16.99, a Xeon E5450 (3GHz) for $39.99, and a
Xeon L5430 (2.66GHz) for $12.99.

While extremely low-priced processors were being snapped up by people looking to make a quick flip on eBay
-- in the slim chance that the orders actually go through -- there
are other price mistakes that aren't such hot deals. A 120GB 7200 RPM
SATA hard drive for a Dell Studio 1735 is listed at a whopping
$21,000 while a laser mouse is going
for a cool $4,000. Another humorous addition is an Inspiron AC
adapter for $710.

Dell may be laying off 700 employees,
but it seems as though its remaining employees will be working
overtime to flag the thousands of orders that have likely been
processed for the ultra-cheap Xeons.

Now we can't be sure that the two
events are related, but something smells fishy for sure at Dell
today.

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This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

I have to disagree about Dell's customer service with some of you, I have a Dell Studio 1535 laptop I bought at Staples and after a couple weeks of use the screen died (this may have been my fault, the my laptop bag took a flying leap against the car door when I cornered a bit too hard a couple days before).

Staples didn't give a crap because it was a couple days over the 14 day return period, so I contacted Dell. The next day I had a shipping box to put my laptop in and I think I had my laptop back with a new screen within a few days. It was a pain talking to various random people and convincing them it wasn't a software problem, but that's a minor inconvenience to getting my laptop back up and running in days.

Their extended warranty prices are very reasonable also (they quoted me something like $90 for 3 years coverage of everything except the battery, including accidental).

"You can bet that Sony built a long-term business plan about being successful in Japan and that business plan is crumbling." -- Peter Moore, 24 hours before his Microsoft resignation